NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission

Lots of people complaining that we have already won the "moon race" and that this makes no sense. This is a completely wrong reading of the situation.

Let's say we forgot how to do heart transplants. Once we did them a few times perfectly, got all surgical techniques right, but patients died shortly after the surgery due to rejection. We quit the whole transplants stuff for years, the techniques and the equipments were lost over time. But then, some 40 years later, we now knew a lot more about immunology, have incredibly advanced drugs, and an aging population. So, because of that, we decided to develop the surgical procedure techniques, long-lost, again.

This is a good analogy for the situation. The moon is an important milestone for further commercial and scientific exploration of the space. We lost the ability we once had to reach it. And anyway, we were not as ready as we are today to follow the next logical steps. If we manage to harvest water from moon ice now, we will be establishing the basis for a kind of serious exploration and development that we weren't nearly ready to achieve in the past.

So, no, we are not doing it just to prove "we haven't lost our mojo", for bragging rights. We are doing it because we are in a development stage where it makes sense to finally return to the moon.

Your example does not support your argument. Unlike heart surgery, there hasn't been a major shift in what we could do if we went back, and more exploration probably won't change the commercial or military prospects of the moon.

No.

Of course, there is a giant shift in what we could do. We can build far more reliable rockets. We have incredible progresses in materials science, in our understanding of the moon's geology. Likewise, we established the presence of water.

We have more advanced solar panels, better batteries, we have a lot of recent research on modular, safe nuclear reactors that could probably lead more easily to moon-ready reactors. We have better batteries. Not only that, but we have better high power semiconductor gear that could lead to high orbit solar power stations over the poles feeding a polar base via microwaves.

We have decades of accumulated knowledge of human physiology under zero gravity.

We are way more prepared to have a permanent presence on the moon today that we could possibly have in the 70s because of those advancements.

Yes, taking Space-X out of it is stupid. SLS is a joke. Boeing idem. On this part of the problem people have my complete agreement. But the moon is a worthwhile goal because we cannot turn our backs to space.